Wedding recap (finally)

Quick puppy update: we brought Beaker home today. She will have a catheter in until Monday, and that necessitates one of those plastic cones on her head (oh, sorry, it's an "Elizabethan Collar") so she can't pull it out with her teeth. Another week after that, they can take out the staples that are in her back. It will take a while before she regrows the hair on her back or on her forelimb where the IV was inserted, and it will still be a while until she can use her hind legs. Even after the use of those limbs comes back (as it should), she has to be relatively confined for 6-8 weeks. That's bad enough for her now, when she can't really go anywhere anyway, but it's going to be rough on her once she can use all of her limbs again. Oh well, the important thing is her long-term health, and that should be on the upswing now.

Now for the wedding update: in short, it went really, really well. My groomsmen took care of a lot of things for me, which was great of them. Despite the fact that it was raining to both the north and the south of our wedding site, we got no more than a few drops--and the weather had the added benefit of keeping the temperatures relatively cool for July. I guess God really watches out for the comfort and convenience of atheists.

The service itself went very well. We had the "Rev" Kapoo perform the service--back when we were planning the wedding, we wanted this good friend involved somehow, and with his theater background we knew he could pull of the role of officiant. He went above and beyond the call of duty: while we figured to have our official ceremony just be something with with the local judge or whatever and have him preside over the show wedding for family and friends, he went out and get certified as a minister of the Universal Life Church, which seems to be a "church" that mostly exists on-line for the purpose of letting people become ordained ministers for the purpose of performing weddings, since "ministers" of any sort are automatically qualified to perform legal weddings, while the rest of us aren't (in most states). We worked with him to craft our ceremony, an entirely secular affair, and it got rave reviews. People were coming up to us in the receiving line to comment specifically on that aspect of our wedding, and continued to do so all night, and I also heard through the family grapevine of people saying the same thing among themselves. I think the ceremony had a couple things going for it in this regard: 1) its relative brevity and 2) the fact that it was different from the normal wedding made people more inclined to pay attention to what was going on. The only blight on the service was that our keyboard player was not very good, and his playing for us arose out of an unsatisfactory situation, but I don't feel inclined to go into that here. I should, though, return to giving Kapoo props, because he also did a great job running the rehearsal (I knew we went right using a theater director!) and fixing glitches in the sound system during the ceremony.

The reception continued the greatness. Made From Scratch Catering out of Columbus did a fantastic job. If anyone reading this (not my regular readers, I suppose, but someone googling in here) is looking for catering anywhere in central Ohio (and we were a solid hour outside of Columbus), I would give them my highest recommendation. From the very start of the process, they were great to work with, helping us consider all of our options and--since we wanted to save money--finding all kinds of ways to help us save money. Don't get me wrong: catering is still a pretty expensive proposition, but we were able to cut several corners while having an awesome reception. The food was great: we had a variety of breads, a salad with greens, strawberries, and a raspberry vineagrette, risotto cakes with spinach, carrots, chicken, and sirloin. The chicken was only good, but everything else was great. This seems particularly amazing when you consider that we used a buffet line, and for the steak we didn't have a carving station, just meat sitting in a heated pan. Several people said it was the best wedding food they'd ever had. 

The real success or failure of a reception, though, rests on the people who come to the reception, and we did well on this score. We had many people out on the dance floor, though not always the same people: different styles of music brought out different crowds, but we always had a large enough number of people that their gravity sucked more people out. Family and friends of all ages seemed to have a good time, and it was particularly nice to see the way that people who were strangers to each other before the wedding ended up dancing together and interacting. What can I say? We're fortunate to be connected to good people. Our DJ, Justin Markle of Platinum Music Productions also played a big part in the fun people had: he was gregarious when needed, without being overbearing or cheesy (as some DJs can be)--he subtly and professionally did a great job putting together a variety of musical styles and keeping things running smoothly. Like our caterer, I would recommend him without reservation to anyone who needs a DJ in central Ohio.

All in all, I'd have to say our marriage had an almost-perfect start with our wedding.

tags: wedding  reception  

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